I RAN into a guy last week in St. Louis that I used to know in another lifetime, back when we were both sports writers in Arkansas. It didn’t surprise me to see him there, because he’s a lifelong Cardinals fanatic and, with his Cards on the brink of their first championship in 24 years, there seemed few other places a Redbird fan would rather be.

I was a little surprised at his travel itinerary, though.

“I just drove in,” he said. “And I’ll drive right home. I have to be at work in the morning.” That’s a good 11 hours of driving in order to see one three-hour baseball game and maybe enjoy one 12-ounce celebratory beer at Mike Shannon’s. That’s some devotion.

But he explained why he couldn’t think of anything he’d rather be doing in a wonderfully eloquent way.

“Man,” he said. “When you have a chance to see a ‘Holy $&!#’ moment, you’d better do what you can to be there.” He’s right, of course. An army of psychiatrists would have a difficult time disseminating all the reasons why people care for sports as deeply and as ardently as they do, why they pay what they do, why they endure the traffic jams, the $30 parking fees, the drunken louts, the arrogant ballplayers, the late starting times, the endless commercial interruptions. When, really, it’s very simple.

We’re all just looking to collect “Holy $&!#” moments.

And no place can you find those very moments more readily, and more regularly, than in a stadium, in an arena, in an ice rink, or anywhere else where the wonderful improvisation of sports is played out.

Sure, sometimes you can get that elsewhere. When you first learn the secret of “The Crying Game,” for instance, that’s an historic “Holy $&!#” moment. Whenever Springsteen wanders onto the stage at some decrepit Jersey bar at 1 in the morning, that’s a keeper of a “Holy $&!#” moment. When your wife says, sure, go to Vegas with the boys, have a great time, that’s a Hall of Fame “Holy $&!#” moment.

But sports, that’s where the cream of the “holy $&!#” crop really lies. And while you can get a similar sensation from television – there may never have been a more universal “Holy $&!#” moment than the Friday night a few years ago when the Pistons and the Pacers had that brawl in Auburn Hills, unless you count the moment when Flutie threw that Hail Mary pass against Miami – you can’t really add those to your collection unless you were there in person.

That, at the end of the day, is what personalizes sports for people. It’s what keeps them coming back, keeps them coming for more.

There are few universal sports conversations you can hold with anyone.

We all come from different sporting cultures, different sporting preferences. Even in New York, we grow up defined by our unique sporting lineage, so if you are a Mets-Jets-Islanders-Knicks fan, you have a completely different outlook than if you’re YankeesGiants-Rangers-Nets. You just do.

It’s the law.

But “Holy $&!#” moments transcend those specific borders. You may hate the Yankees. But if you were inside Yankee Stadium on the night when Tino Martinez tied Game 4 of the 2001 World Series in the ninth inning – or the next night, when Scott Brosius did the same thing in Game 5 – you know you can’t really control this phenomenon.

Involuntarily, that’s what you start jabbering: “Holy $&!#, holy $&!#, holy $&!#!” Everyone’s lists are different. You have to be lucky.

But once they’re on your list, they stay there forever.

My personal top 5?

1. Brosius-Martinez. I was there for both, and I can tell you you’ve never heard a stadium come closer to chanting “Holy $&!#” than you did that night. It was astonishing.

2. Larry Johnson’s 4-point play, in the 1999 playoffs. Doesn’t matter that it was probably a brutal call. What matters is that LJ made the shot, and the foul, and the Knicks won the game, and you can still hear the echoes of that moment in the Garden.

3. Reggie Miller, just about any time, but primarily at the end of Game 5 of the ’02 playoffs against the Nets, only because Nets fans had seen him torture the Knicks so many times, they knew the Nets couldn’t let Miller get open for a good look, the Nets didn’t, Miller had to heave one from about 40 feet away .. and it still went in. I mean, what else can you say except, “Holy $&!#”?

4. The Jeter Flip Play. I saw it live. I’ve seen it 10,000 times since. And it’s still a “Holy $&!#” moment to end all “Holy $&!#” moments.

5. The Endy Chavez catch. The latest addition. For 55,000 Mets fans who were there that night, and still haven’t gotten over what happened later, at least they’ll always have this, a permament addition to their collections.

Mike Vaccaro’s e-mail address is michael.vaccaro@nypost.com. His YankeesRed Sox book, “Emperors and Idiots,” is available in paperback at bookstores.

VAC’S WHACKS

OK, I understand I wasn’t exactly a young Rob Lowe back in the day at old Chaminade High. But I also know that none of the cheerleaders at Sacred Heart and Our Lady of Mercy looked quite like the one that Minka Kelly (left) plays on “Friday Night Lights,” either.

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If Mike Fratello was going to have such incredibly problematic hair issues, couldn’t he have just kicked it completely oldschool and gone back to that Mike Brady perm he used to sport back when he coached the Hawks?

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If you haven’t seen the wonderful documentary “Once In A Lifetime” about the rise and fall of the old Cosmos (and featuring our own spendidly telegenic Phil Mushnick), it’s worth it just to see how much everyone still hates poor Giorgio Chinaglia, who in his day apparently was capable of making A-Rod seem like a clubhouse unifier.

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Judging by how hard Scott Spiezio hit that NLCS-changing triple in Game 2, the real problem with Guillermo Mota may not have been that he was on the juice, but that he wasn’t taking enough.